CAREGIFTED is pleased to announce the Caregiver Blog of the Week Award! This award will recognize the most outstanding, beautiful, uplifting, painful and/or moving story of the week blogged by a caregiver.

Caregivers are the unsung heroes of our world. Caregivers who not only do the more-than-fulltime work of caregiving but also write and share their experiences with the world deserve to be recognized and honored. Each week our team will sift through the caregiving blogosphere and select a winning blogger, blog or blog post to be honored at CAREGIFTED.ORG. Email us at info@caregifted.org to nominate a Caregiver Blog of the Week.

Darolyn “Lyn” Jones, in her own words, doesn’t “… just live this life of being a mother to a special needs child, I study it, and I write it.” During the 11 years she and her husband Jim have spent caring for her severely disabled son, she has written dozens of wonderfully composed and heartfelt works about a life that places so much weight upon her shoulders. Her blog beautifully illustrates the individual commitment that has made her a successful mother, writer, teacher and activist for literacy education, despite— or as she would say, because of—the demands of a life devoted to the care of her son.

I power lift because it’s the only time I feel powerful and in control.

In fact, most of the time as a mom of a child with special needs, I feel powerless, I feel powerless when I look at an X-ray or an MRI of Will’s body, and I see lots of white forms and shapes: a Gtube, a Baclofen pump the size of hockey puck, a kinky catheter line running from the pump into his spine, and layers of heavy, white scarring at multiple sites on his legs from lengthening’s and on his lungs from multiple pneumonias. And bones turned in and joints not seated correctly and pronounced bones in his knees, hands, and elbows from 11 years of dragging his body across the floor in an attempt for some mobility freedom.

— Heavy Lifting, Heavy Heart by Lyn Jones

Lyn Jones on power lifting: "I lift, because when I lift, all I have to do is control one bar. People think it’s hard, but compared to the rest of my life, it’s easy. It’s me versus the bar."